#165 Data & AI for Good, with Marga Hoek, Founder & CEO, Business for Good

Hi, I'm Maggie, VP of Curriculum at datacamp and I know firsthand how overwhelming it can be to keep up with the rapid changes in data and AI. But staying ahead doesn't have to be hard. That's why our curriculum team has curated the best learning content to help you and your team stay ahead, covering everything from data and AI literacy for busy executives to cutting edge generative AI for developers, and everything in between. Whether you're upskilling yourself or your team, we make learning practical, engaging and flexible. It just works. Power your data and AI transformation journey on datacamp.com.

So really have to pick back up and accelerate. But then comes in the phenomena of technology and technology, when applied ethically and responsibly with the intent to address these challenges, can actually, I think, be our biggest ally in this whole transformation to sustainable society. It can help find solutions that we couldn't before. It can help us reach places we couldn't before with way lower cost. It can scale up solutions much more quicker. So technology is hugely important and we can't do it without it.

Hello everyone.

Welcome to Dataframe. I'm Adele, data evangelist and educator at datacamp, and if you're new here, Data Framed is a weekly podcast in which we explore how individuals and organizations can succeed with data and AI. There's often this debate in technology ethics on whether technology is neutral or not. On one hand, critics have rightfully pointed out examples of technology exacerbating the climate crisis amplifying bias as we've seen in our recent episode with With Joy meaning or contributing to the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Conversely, we cannot deny the many wonderful things technology has given us from better.

Healthcare, the ability to communicate wherever we.

Are in the world, or to elevate the quality of life of everyone on the planet. It is this duality that today's guest Marca Hoek points to as to why technology is neutral and why it is in our hands. Use it for good Marga Hoek has been at the forefront of sustainable business capital technology as a three time CEO, Board member, Chair and Founder of Business for Good. She has always demonstrated how business and technology can be a force for good. She's also a best selling author and her most recent book, Tech for Solving the World's Greatest Challenges, is a big focus of today's discussion. Throughout the episode we talk about how technology can be leveraged solving challenges like climate change, income inequality and sustainability, why data and AI will be foundational for achieving humanity's biggest goals, how organizations and leaders can drive the Tech for Good agenda and a lot more Just one note before we jump into the chat. There are certain points where the audio quality on the episode slightly goes down.

We're really sorry about that, but we.

Hope it's still a useful conversation for you. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe to the show, give it a rating. Share on Social we'd love to hear your feedback. Now onto today's episode.

Margo Hoek Great to have you on the show.

Thank you Adol. It's a great pleasure to be here.

So your resume is too long to list, but you've held numerous CEO positions at multiple private and public companies. You have founded the Dutch Sustainable Business Association. You also hold numerous advisory board positions. You're an author and you're most recent book Deck for Good is what we're going to talk about today. So maybe to set the stage, walk us through why you decided to work on the book Deck for Good and what's the vision of the future you're trying to point to paint here?

Yeah, well that's actually a huge question Adil. So yeah, to get started when you you were giving a description of my background and experience, I think it's good to share a little bit about that leading up to why I wrote then in the end to take for Good. So I'm a business person that is important to mention. So I've led companies, as you mentioned, been a CEO of three companies. And throughout that time it became more and more clear to me that I want to be a business leader that makes business a power for good. Because I found that you can do business in a good way, in a profitable way with a strong competitive position and great outlooks. But at the same time you can leverage the power of your business to create ecological, social and governance value ESG or just a positive impact in the world if you will. And I was fascinated that you can do that, that you can be an entrepreneur and a business leader and then be worth more than just the balance sheet of your company to contribute to creating a better world. By business I found that fascinating. By now I mean many people embrace that thinking and many CEOs repeat that same message. But back then, and I'm talking over 20 years ago, it was rather innovative. It was a new which we talked about social conscious entrepreneurship and those things. But it was more about doing your business while not harming too much. And I turned around, I said business must be a force for good and can create a better world and be a great company at the same time and having that approach and done that by experience and implementing it in all kinds of innovative business cases and collaborations. I was asked to set up the Dutch Sustainable Business association because governments wanted to have a different dialogue with businesses, because back then sustainability was not integrated in the heart of companies yet. So I did that. And that brought me into such a privileged position to get to know over 250 companies in the Netherlands alone, and later throughout Europe, many thousands. What they were struggling with, how they could do it, and how all of us together could create a movement that business does contribute to the world. And then in 2015, the Sustainable Development Goals were being developed and embraced by 193 countries around the world, which is quite a big thing. And at that time I was talking to some business leaders and I noted that everybody was talking about it, everybody thought it was a great idea. But now what? Now business has to action it and what are we supposed to do? How can we do that? And also there was very little awareness that yes, we need to address those Sustainable development goals, the 17 do list for the world between 2015 and 2030, but that can be done, as I experienced before in my career, with a positive business case. So that will give you the idea to write the trillion dollar shift, emphasizing that business needs the Sustainable Development Goals as much as the Sustainable Development Goals need business. And that by engaging we can unlock new markets the size of $12 trillion. That book took off very well and it got a Golden Award and everything like that was a bestseller. But having written that book and moving on a couple of years, I noted that very few people actually knew about the role of technology in all of that. And I also noted that technology evolves really quickly, that we move the threshold of the so called fourth Industrial Revolution, and that actually there's a huge potential to synergize sustainability and technology as to accelerate and fuel the sustainable transformation, but also equally to benefit businesses believe in this shared value concept. So I noted that very people, very few people know about these technologies. I mean, they have heard something and they know it's supposed to find it important, but what is it really about? And I knew it had a huge impact to accelerate sustainability. And it's also fascinating once you find out all kinds of business cases and companies that actually do this, it gives you hope because then you see, oh, we can do so much more than we could before, because technology enables us to do all kinds of things we couldn't do before. It accelerates things, it unlocks markets and it can even In a way, make up for lost time and bring us back on track to achieving those goals. Because as we find ourselves at the midpoint between 2015 and 2030, we're not anywhere near the midpoint of achieving those goals. So you could also turn this around. We desperately need technology to even stand a chance of achieving those goals. Without technology, we can't. With the help of technology, we really stand a chance.

Yeah, that's really great and I really appreciate the holistic overview here and the importance of stakeholder capitalism in a lot of ways, the vision that you're trying to paint here and the importance of businesses in driving this tech for good vision. Now, kind of deep diving more. What you mentioned here is the fourth Industrial Revolution. The word tech for good. The book title is divided into two parts, right? Tech and good. So maybe starting off with the tech part, right, the fourth Industrial revolution that you mentioned, you discussed eight different technologies here that will be foundational to help us accelerate sustainability and development goals, to unlock new value when driving sustainability and development goals. Walk us through these technologies in a bit more detail and what potential readers of the book can expect here when.

You look at these new technologies and everything that appears on the horizon. Whilst we enter this industrial revolution in the former, as you all know, was about digitalization, this new tech revolution actually blends physical and digital technologies. And whilst the former digitalization revolution was very focused on digitalization per se, now we have a broad variety, a wide range of advanced technologies, physical and digital and blending. And that's the first notion to have when you talk about all of these technologies. That is not just, although very important, AI or robotics or any of these, but that it's a wide range and it's actually not technologies. I'll rather call them technology groups because it's like it's just a way of structuring the book. You could say to divide all these technology groups into eight groups and within these groups you have a lot of variations. And of course it's about the combination of these groups, because that's another important notion about this fourth industrial revolution. Every technology doesn't stand by itself but is being combined. 2, 3, 4 technologies and that together creates an application. Some technologies are very foundational and others or technologies that build on it. So while mentioning that the eight groups you ask in the book are AI and data, 3D printing, robotics, advanced materials, extended realities, or in other words, augmented in virtual reality, autonomous vehicles and drones, blockchain and space tech. These are all eight groups. They speak for themselves, I would say, and Most importantly is the combination of the different groups. So let me give you an example, because we can do a tech talk here and then we'll lose the listeners, I'm afraid. But to give you one example, for instance, Azure farmbeats is a company in the US which focuses on farming and agriculture. That's their focus and that they apply technologies like AI drones, satellite satellites, image based machine learning algorithms, and jointly, all these technologies set out to increase the productivity for the farms. The reason to apply it to get more out of this farm. Now, obviously, those farms create healthy food and we have a huge need for that. I mean, we have a growing need for food, although we waste a lot, so that's important. And together these technologies create, for instance, images of the farm to the square meter, enabling crop decisions to make better decisions for the crop, to optimize labor, to improve the output by optimizing conditions. So the crop has the best possible conditions by detecting diseases early and solving it so that we don't have crop loss. And in a way, it's a data driven way of firming. So that's an example how these technologies combined together bring solutions.

Yeah, that's really great. And then we talked about here the technology applications and how they come together. There's also the other side of the book, which is what good is an application? Right. Maybe walk us through how you define the barometer for what a prosperous future looks like. You mentioned the Sustainability Development Goals. Walk me through the research behind that. And more importantly, how do you view the role of technology in accelerating the sustainable Sustainability Development Goals in many ways?

Well, I just mention it, these Sustainable Development Goals, actually you could say that's the new definition of sustainability. Before we had the Millennial Goals and they were very much focused on lifting people out of poverty. Because back then, sustainability, or ESG or whatever you want to call it, was very much of importance to governments and NGOs, and at that time, less so for business. I mean, that grew over time when we achieved those Millennial Goals. And fortunately at that time we did. And many millions of people were actually lifted out of poverty. Then of course, by then we had a grown awareness that we had many more challenges than poverty. That that time the sense of the importance to beat climate change was growing. We became more aware that biodiversity is a huge problem. We came to the realization it's actually ecological challenges, social challenges and governance challenges. And that all came into fruition when the Sustainable Development goals were selected. 17 goals all falling into the buckets of ESG. And jointly they represent all the challenges we have in the world. So by achieving them, we have a lasting, sustainable and just world. And by just, I mean being inequality and everybody having a basic human right way of living around the planet. So what I find a prosperous future is in that sense where well described by these sustainable Development Goals. Now as I mentioned earlier, they came with a timeline. We set them out in 2015, we're at midpoint now and we need to achieve them in 2030. And by no means are we on track. Now having said that, that also has to do with COVID of course the corona pandemic pushed back on progress, plateaued and then made us decline. So really have to pick back up and accelerate. But then comes in the phenomena of technology. And technology, when applied ethically and responsibly with the intent to address these challenges, can actually I think be our biggest ally in this whole transformation to sustainable society. It can help find solutions that we couldn't before. It can help us reach places we couldn't before with way lower cost. It can scale up solutions much more quicker. So technology is hugely important and we can't do it without it. As I mentioned before, it addresses 70% of the Sustainable Development Goals. So 70% Sustainable Development Goals directly profits from technology. And last but not least, let me touch upon one other point that is that it also can help bridge the investment gap. There's a huge amount of capital needed to achieve those Sustainable Development goals and investments in technology, which are often good investments, can help to bridge that gap while also creating higher impact. So there's so many reasons why we must want to apply tech for good addressing these sustainable Development goals.

Yeah, and one thing that I love about the book is that it actually is grounded with a lot of practical examples about how tech is used to advance a lot of these sustainable development goals. You mentioned the Azure Farm beat example and use case. You also discussed how sustainable, like how these different technologies when combined together can accelerate sustainable development goals. Maybe walk us through some of your favorite use cases and examples that you've covered in the book that kind of showcase a blueprint for how we can leverage technology for advancing sustainability and development goals.

Yeah, it was a pleasure and it's good that you mentioned that because I often find when I do keynotes and I meant, and I and I experienced that with the trillion dollar shipbook already, that people absolutely love those cases because we can share all kinds of technology, but when you share real life cases of companies that have done it, and of course not everything is a success. So I don't want to share only cases that become a huge success. I mean the failures are not failures because there were attempts from which we learned.

So they're learnings.

Yep, yeah, yeah, they're learning. So it's about that. But the concrete cases helps people and it's also the storytelling that's inside those cases, which is inspiring. So throughout the new book Tech for good, we have 75 real life business cases described. All of those cases apply one or several of these advanced technologies of the eight groups that we just described and for every case we describe, what is this company doing? How is it applying certain or a number of technologies? What is the impact of IT on the Sustainable Development Goals? So we mentioned the specific SDGs as you can abbreviate them in every case. And what does it do in real life? How much impact does it have? How does it grow and what does it do? And you asked me to mention a couple of those cases. That's always difficult. Now I have to choose from so many cases, but I'll mention a few. Let me just go through quickly through a couple of examples. For instance, Capgemini, which is financial services company headquartered in in France, but a global company, they aimed to preserve the Mojave Desert in the US and they partnered. And this is also typical for companies that are forward thinking in terms of sustainability and technology. Partner with surprising organizations, in this case the Nature Conservatory in Nevada. And they created with a combination of tax algorithms to trace paths and outside paths areas to estimate the erosion as to make sure to take timely action. So that's one thing. Also important with artificial intelligence we can get huge amount of data, analyze them, make them actionable and then take action. Can't without the technology. Another company is Vilatech who is 3D printing from waste. I mean that's such a simple thought, huh? We can print, but why use natural resources for it? Let's focus on the technology to change that into printing from waste. And quite some early startups in Africa, for instance, use that technology or in regions where we unfortunately still have a lot of waste, like India, to apply that principle to clean up the land in a way and for new products. Because not only is that impactful and has a low cost, but also it creates an awareness to think about value rather than waste. So has that impact. And for instance Micride Infinite in Kenya. In Africa they use 3D printed prototypes to support surgeons. Had they not had Access to these 3D printed prototypes, they wouldn't be able to to do those surgeons. But this is a health way of educating them and now they can. Fram Lab in New York is an initiative which is very creative. It's actually 3D printed homes for the for the homeless, but it's done in a vertical way and it's like 3D printed cells that might sound unattractive, but it's actually not ugly at all throughout city. And because it's vertical it needs very little space and the costs are way lower than building anything else. And that way we can secure much more homes, especially in the winter for the homeless. Interface, a carpet tile company listed company in the US went on a mission zero early on, achieved it and then set out to boost innovations, help with the technology to be a positive impact in the world. I talk a lot about this, you know. And for instance that project Climate Takeback is a technology that takes out carbon from the air via an ingenious process, creates granules for it as a resource for carpets and then uses it. So this whole carbon removal market is growing rapidly. As you know, Croatia has a web platform and a mobile app called Fuiwa for mapping free drinking water locations around the world. Sounds very simple but very much needed. Well, the list goes on. I can mention lot more cases, but let me pause here.

Yeah, and that's a really excellent kind of overview of different use cases here because you mentioned case studies that accelerate our ability to take action on climate. You mentioned use cases that accelerate our ability to tackle homelessness, accelerate our ability to create new materials in a sustainable way. And what I love about the examples that you're mentioning here is that they truly paint a very hopeful vision of technology. And you mentioned this example by Capgemini about using data and AI to trace paths and outside paths erosion to conserve the Mojave Desert in the us. And I think it wouldn't be a data framed episode if we don't deep dive about the potential applications of data and AI. So maybe walk us in more detail how you view the role of data and AI in a bit more detail in driving the Tech for Good agenda. And what excites you about data and AI and driving applications here for Technology.

For good AI in essence enables us to share real time information on a global scale that enables us to analyze huge amounts of data that we couldn't before and take actionable results out of it. As I described earlier, it's a simple way to explain can analyze large amounts of data to bring together insights from huge groups of patients for it to improve diagnosis and predictive analysis. And it has been applied for lung scans and diagnosing Covid, for instance, great thing is that we can use huge pools of data, pull them together and make them mean something because without that analysis it wouldn't mean something. And if we would have to do that without that technology, can you imagine how much time we would need and how much effort it would take to do that in another way? And we don't have time. I just mentioned we're midpoint stgs, we are way behind. I mean we have cop 28 in a couple of weeks from now and everybody's talking about, oh, we're not going to make that 1.5 degrees Celsius and all attempts anyway. So we have very little time. And that makes me so enthusiastic about technology because we can accelerate and we can progress much quicker with much more impact than without those technologies. And you touched upon AI and data, for instance, it can do in combination with other technologies. We can forecast floods and fires, we can monitor marine life, we can detect plant disease, we can advance education, a topic close to your heart, as I know. We can prevent overfishing, we can warn against storms so that disasters don't hit so many people as before. We can use AI and data in combination with other technologies to enhance self driving cars, manufacturing robots and so on and so forth. It's a foundational technology, it can do a lot. And I know that many people fear technology doom technology. And of course technologies are not without risks. There are significant risks, but we cannot accept to say, okay, we're going to be like paralyzed because there's so many risks and we all fear things because the world doesn't have time. So we need to work together to be able to seize the value of technology in relation to ourselves and the planet.

You mentioned fear and anxiety here and I think this touches upon my next question quite great. A lot of the recent waves of innovation that we've seen with AI. So maybe to preface, I'm a deep optimist when it comes to data and AI. I agree with your perspective that I think data and AI has the potential to really drive a lot of benefits for humanity in the next couple of decades and more to come. But of course, the recent wave of innovation that I just mentioned here, brought upon especially by generative AI, has caused a lot of anxiety around what AI could mean for the future. I think by having more of a vantage point on the space, I would categorize this anxiety into four broad areas. The impact on the labor market, potential job displacement, what it means for the future of work. The impact of AI on perpetuating bias, systemic discrimination, making the world more unequal. The use of AI by malevolent actors brain, broad definition here, but could be the use of AI for creating fake news, deep fakes or accelerating cyber threats. And I think more long term there's this risk of AI becoming an existential risk for humanity. Maybe focusing on that first risk because I think this is really actionable for the next few years to come. I would love to focus on the impact on the labor market. What do you view AI's impact on jobs in the labor market? And walk us through that particular risk as you see in that kind of source of anxiety.

Yeah, I'll come to that in a second. But let me react also on what you just said before, that people fear technology and that technology can be an existential risk as you mention it, and all bad things happen because of technology. We tend to blame technology and actually that's not correct because technology in itself is neutral and it gets meaning by the way we apply it. We peeing humans, the decisions we make, direct future and the takeoff future and ultimately the future of our world. So if fear, then we actually should fear ourselves because it's by people that use it for bad rather than for good. It's because of lack of regulations, good governance around technology that those risks aren't addressed timely. Which is understandable because it's so new to what to do with it. But we have to step up to accelerate laws, regulations and governance around technologies. And we have to be aware that all of us needs to be focused on applying technology in an ethical and a responsible way. Because technology doesn't decide itself what it's going to do. We decide. So sorry, Adele. I wanted to make that point because actually very important.

I think I agree with you.

Yeah. And then you talked about labor markets and potential for job displacements. Yeah, true. I mean it was recently calculated by the World economic forum that 25% of the jobs will be disrupted. So yeah, it was recently calculated by the World Economic forum that actually 25% of the jobs will be disrupted soon. It also be calculated that around 75 million jobs will disappear, but 133 new jobs will appear. So it's a transition. And this is of all times with former revolutions. The same happened of course when we had the first and the second industrial Revolution. We had a shift in labor because first everything was handmade and then we had factories and manufacturing processes and oil and gas and light and later digitalization. So yes, it's not called a revolution without reason. There will be a Huge transition of labor, jobs that will disappear, but also other jobs that will appear. And it all comes down to our ability to act on that. And I think most importantly to timely adapt education. Because we need completely new competencies. Some will be completely redundant. The biggest risk is that we are too slow in addressing what competence is and what new jobs will be coming up and will be important in the near future. And what would be like educating for the past rather than for the future.

And you mentioned here education and skills transformation, this is something that we think about quite often at Datacamp, how we should be thinking about the future skills of the workforce, how should governments, organizations.

Businesses react here, as I mentioned, I mean we need to think about what jobs will disappear, will be disappearing. If I google the news and I'm interested in all those topics, so now and again I do that, I think 90% of what you see is about what jobs will be disappearing about fearing that will, what will become lost, who will lose their jobs. And that's very important. I see very little about, okay, what are new competences that will be in demand because of technology taken over many roles? And what are the professions of the future? So one, don't only focus on what is going to disappear, because that's going to happen regardless of what you do, but focus on what is needed for the future in terms of skills, the new skill set. Bring that into education and make sure you inform people that those are the winning kind of new professions and that we need people for that. Because we will not only face lack of employment for those who don't have the skill set that is needed post war of the industrial revolution, so to say, but will also face a huge lack of people of workforce that does have those competences and skills. To give you an example, focused on the renewable energy transition, and rightfully so. But now already we are faced that we are pushing windmills on land and on sea and we don't have people to repair those things because we forgot about not only putting those things out there, but that also there's a workforce needed to maintain them. And that applies to so many areas.

Yeah, and I couldn't agree more here on the importance the this future that you're, that you're painting here of, it's going to be a transition, but many new jobs will be created as a consequence of AI and we're going to see more of current work being augmented with AI rather than automated as well. Now one thing that we touched upon you mentioned here, the importance of human agency and how we use AI and technologies, maybe. And one thing that you touched upon here is the importance of the correct governance. So maybe what do you expect? What do you think the right appropriate of governance needs to look like for AI as this technology becomes more and more advanced? I know that's a big question at the moment, but I'd love to get your thoughts here.

Yeah, and I can't give you a simple answer on that question, but what is important is to really think from the perspective. Okay, what happens is the technology scales up and it does scale up. Then what is important in terms of preventing male intent? What is needed to make sure that it's being applied with an ethical and a responsible intent? That's the first thing. Second, the risks that come along with it and they exist in case good and a bad intent. How do we mitigate those risks? Thirdly, how do we also hold companies responsible to apply tech in an ethical way? So, so if I compare, for instance, the European Union does a lot now to safeguard that companies don't do window dressing, green washing, better said, they have to disclose a lot of information, they have to report and all of that, but that doesn't include technology. So we have to give it the same importance as sustainability to technology and connect the two. That is ultimately important. How to do that precisely, I don't know. But it is a collaboration of all stakeholders involved here. It's not just government. I was thinking about that because day before yesterday in the news and World Economic forum spread that 100 CEOs writing a letter what they expect of the governments to decide on at COP28. That's all great that they say the governments have to do the procurement in the right way, they have to invest more or they have to do this, they have to do that. What lacked in the letter is also what business is going to do themselves. I didn't see any numbers like, okay, we create a fund together, these hundred CEOs and we'll scale up this. Or instead of only committing to our 2030 and 2015 goals, now we step up because we know we're behind. So we'll do that. And then governments, if you do that, then together we accelerate progress. So we all need to collaborate on this, all stakeholders involved to make it progress.

Yeah, and I think you're mentioning here the roles of businesses in taking leadership and being proactive and taking ownership of the kind of tech for good agenda, the SG agenda. And I think this is really related to this concept of trust that you mentioned as well in our discussion. Right. I think it will be crucial for technology and the tech industry in general to have strong trust with society in order to drive these applications for tech for good. But you mentioned there's increasing distrust in technology, right? There's this increasing belief that is in a net negative.

Wrong. It's in an all time low currently.

Yeah, 100% all time low on technology. What is driving that distrust and how can we restore that trust?

What's driving the distrust is of course everything that people see and read in the news of for instance, a handful of corporates, big tech often or entrepreneurs using technology for the self interest of their individual or company by other incidents that were in the news. For instance in the States around cryptocurrencies. There's a lot of technology with not lacking an ethical intent that is going on now that should be stopped because that does a lot of harm. Even worse because it combines with the fear that people already have. Because everybody always fears transformations they don't control. So the combination of those bad incidents with the fear that's already there is decremental. What needs to be done is, as I just mentioned, collaboration of all stakeholders. We need better regulations, policies, governance and more timely, not lagging design because then it doesn't help. We need business leaders to take the responsibility to apply technology with an ethical intent and preferably to really address these sustainable development goals. There's huge amounts of market opportunities, there's no need to apply it with male intent. And then we need investments to scale. A lot more money needs to go into that. In the beginning of our conversation I mentioned that technology can actually bridge the funding gap there is for the SDGs. Then we have to invest a lot more shift capital, so to say, I mean currently there was an all time high amount of $3 trillion invested in subsidies for fossil fuels. I mean that's huge. We have no choice, we have to redirect it. It's crazy. So all those things together should help to scale it up. And in that sense that's also the reason why I wrote this book. I wanted to shed a light on technology, how it can actually help as opposed to everything that people read. That only brings down the trust further. I hope my book helps to build the trust in that sense. If everybody reads what it can do and what the good things that are being done around the world already, that might be a little stone helping to build that trust.

Yeah, and I think you're mentioning here about something. A central message of the book is that it's all in our hands. Right. Maybe I'll quote Here a section from.

The book Technology itself is neutral.

It is the implication of technology that count rather than the applications. We can decide how to use technology. And the examples of these applications that you've mentioned showcase really strong leadership in driving technology for good. And the applications that you mentioned that are driving distress, for example, are also maybe a lack thereof here, maybe I think capping off today's discussion, walk us through the role that technologists leaders have in making sure that tech is used for good. How should leaders be thinking about the tech for good agenda?

I think we all have to be a little bit more moonshot thinkers. I describe in the book the concept of moonshot thinking for a reason in a good definition, because they use, you know, everything becomes a buzzword at a certain point and then it's. It's in the wrong way. But in its pure essence it means that you start thinking from the perspective of these sustainable development goals, of one or several of huge challenges. So for instance, climate change, beating hunger, whatever. If you start thinking from that perspective and then think back to what competencies, what assets do I have with my company, what can I do to contribute to that? And you translate that into business solutions, that assures you that whatever you do, it will be an ethical approach. Because it is ethical in the beginning. When you start thinking from the global challenges and then relate back to business, it's starting from the end, reasoning back. So to say. I think that's the best approach because that yours that you try to solve a problem. I wish many more entrepreneurs and companies think like that. On the other hand, there's many front runners that have proved by now thinking of dear friend of mine, Faqi Seibesma, the former CEO of gsm, who had for instance a slogan saying purpose driven but performance led. Purpose driven means that you start thinking from the challenge, not from yourself, but from what is going on in the world. How can my company contribute to it and then translate it into a business driven approach? Which is fine because companies need to make money in order to be sustainable. That's not the problem. So I hope many more people will do that and in that sense contribute to the tech for good movement. And one thing that gives me a lot of hope is that with the change of generations, and currently we have five generations in the workforce, which has never happened before, and millennials, generation Z and Alpha after that will soon be the majority of the marketplace, the workforce and so on. And they have two advantages. One is that in essence they're more purpose driven than former generations. They find sustainability in contributing to a better world, more important than former generations. Second, they are either tech savvy or tech native. So they're inclined to be much more engaged with technology and less worried about things like privacy and so on than former generations. And that should be wind in the sail of this movement.

Yeah, and you mentioned these generations here, right? And in a lot of ways, advocating for the tech for good agenda when you work for an organization requires courage, right? Requires to challenge the status quo. What's your advice for leaders who want to challenge the status quo? How can they make the case here?

I think challenging the status quo is not a purpose in itself. I mean, it's about creating value for our future. And if you have to challenge the status quo to do that, then you have to do that. And I know that's often the case because when I was CEO of the Dutch Sustainable Business association, for instance, we were constantly in a dialogue with governments because the current rules and regulations were actually preventing us to create more sustainable business models than accelerating it. So a lot of change is needed there. And the same applies to tech. But the purpose must be to create positive impact, to create real value and real progress. And with that comes often the struggle to free yourself of current limitations, which you then have to.

And then this is where technology comes in to innovate and drive new value. Now Marga, as we close out our conversation, what do you most hope readers will learn from and take away from this book?

Well, of course I hope that they, they learn more about the technologies, that they familiarize themselves with it, that they come to the realization, you know, it's eight group of technologies in combination, they create a lot of value. Non tech sectors should apply it because it's not a tech thing anymore related to one specific sector, but applies to everyone and all that. But I think moreover, and even more importantly, it is a book of hope. And I use the word imagine in the subtitle of the book. You know, it's Imagine Tech for good solves the world's greatest challenges. Because after I had written the book, I realized it's hope that people need to grow trust, to dare to take initiative and to overcome any insecurities they have with technology because it can do so much good. And so every chapter in the book starts literally with imagine. And then I describe what you can imagine the tech could do. And what imagines for instance, is about coral reef without action. Within a few decades, 99% of all coral reefs on earth will disappear. And percentage already has disappeared. Now of course we need to change our behavior because the reason for this disappearance of the coral reefs is climate change and pollution. And so we need to solve that. But having the problem of the coral reef now we have the opportunity with 3D printing to recover coral reefs weeks instead of hundred years. And that means that we can solve, we can mitigate the damage that has already been done. So I describe these things to people so that they see, well, you know, this is more important than fearing it or than disengaging because this is what we can do. In that sense, it's a book of hope.

That's really great. I think this is a great note to end our episode on today. Marga. Finally, do you have any final call to action before we wrap up today's episode?

Call to action One is of course, read the book Adele. That makes sense. Call to action. Yeah, get into action. You know, familiarize yourself with the topic. Read up on it, Think about how your company can be a force for good. Realize that that's the best way forward. If you don't want to do it for moral reasons, do it for business reasons. And there's a great one liner of Einstein that I sometimes use. It's not knowledge that brings humanity forward in the end, but it's imagination. So use your imagination and be bold and dare to innovate.

Yeah, that's really great. Margot, thank you so much for coming on Datafriend.

It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me sa.